Creativity is extremely important when developing and maintaining your brand. You want your team to feel able to be free with their ideas. This can seem slightly at odds when introducing guidelines, as the term can give the impression of rigid rules and limitations.
However, there is no reason why your brand guidelines can’t have the flexibility and element of freedom you want – while still incorporating clear standards and an up-to-date structured vision. Brought together, these elements can give you the perfect format for brand development.
Let’s have a look at brand guidelines in more detail and what you can do to upgrade them.
No matter the size of your company, brand guidelines are important to keep clarity and consistency within your brand. Open briefs can overwhelm and frustrate team members, so it is a good idea to have the brand vision set out clearly. Your team are then free to refer to them when needed.
Many companies use a PDF for outlining their brand guidelines, which can bring its own limitations. PDFs can’t be edited and so updating and sharing information isn’t much of an option. Having a single point of reference is the simplest method when sharing a brand vision with others, however, using a lengthy PDF is likely to complicate matters.
When managing your branding team, it is helpful when sharing content to be able to track who has seen each piece of information and who hasn’t. This isn’t something that you can do with PDFs – another negative for this format.
The sheer number of different elements that need to come together to create a successful brand can be surprising. From logo to fonts, taglines to colour palette – your branding team needs to agree on a clear identity for your brand and the ways to promote it.
Using multiple storage methods and a rigid file format to work collaboratively can become a real headache. Team members are likely to do a lot more searching for content, wasting time and causing delays. That’s made worse when a new version is needed for even the smallest tweak.
The solution to this problem is simply to use a digital asset management (DAM) system. A DAM is a centralised repository for all of your content, everything stored clearly in one location. Giving you more control over the process allows each person working on branding, access to all the information that they need. Using something as simple as a Word document in a DAM system, they will be able to check on the content already in place, make edits, share ideas and see all updates easily. Productivity will rise due to this being a much more efficient and collaborative working method.
Keeping your brand on point is vital when you want to convince customers to buy into it. With iBase’s DAM software, you can do exactly that, with clear, up-to-date brand guidelines that can be accessed, edited and shared by authorised users.
Want to make it easier to keep your brand on point? Contact iBase for a free one-to-one demo of our DAM software.
